The Fault In Our Stars tops US charts on $48.2m

The Fox 2000 drama dislodged Maleficent and dismissed the challenge of Tom Cruise to storm to number one.

While The Fault In Our Stars owes a significant portion of its success to the presence of It Girl Shailene Woodley, who leads the cast alongside her Divergent co-star Ansel Elgort, a smart social media play contributed to the stunning debut.

The YA book’s author John Green may in fact be the biggest star of the equation. He enjoys a huge social footprint – commanding around 2.1m subscribers on his YouTube channel and 2.5m Twitter followers – and Fox 2000 did well to mobilise his fans.

According to studio data, around 80% of the film’s audience was female and the same portion was under 25 – right in the Millennial sweetspot that has made a bestseller of Green’s book about sweethearts who meet at a cancer support group.

The fact that half of the audience said they had not read the book speaks well to Fox 2000’s campaign. The film cost around $12m and at this rate is well on its way to the $100m mark. Josh Boone directed.

Disney’s Maleficent fell 52% in its second session, adding $33.5m for $127.4m and climbing to $335m worldwide.

Warner Bros’ sci-fi Edge Of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt was a big hit internationally on $111m for the weekend but could not make the same impact in North America, where it arrived at number three on $29.1m despite excellent reviews.

Doug Liman directed the sci-fi action tale about an alien invasion and the production cost reportedly amounted to $178m. The film generated $4.2m from Imax.

Fox’s X-Men: Days Of Future Past has reached $189.1m and ranks fourth after three weekends. Godzilla in sixth place stands at $185m after four sessions.

In limited release Reliance Big opened the action title Holiday at number on $413,000 from 144 venues. Hipster distributor A24 released one of two Sundance selections that launched this weekend as Obvious Child arrived on $81,000 from three sites for a smashing $27,000 average.

Gravitas Ventures opened the other Park City premiere, Ping Pong Summer, on $31,900 from 17 sites.

Overall the top 12 fell around 5% compared to last weekend and gained approximately 6% against the same session in 2013.

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